Building The Future | Benjamin Anderson

Benjamin Anderson [00:00:00] The year is 2100. There are a billion people on earth that are chronologically over the age of one 50, but biologically they are more representative of a 25 to a 45-year-old. That's a crazy version of the future. Welcome

Vance Crowe [00:00:15] Back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Benjamin Anderson returns longtime listeners in the podcast will know that around episode 45, I had this weird character named Benjamin on. He had dropped out of college and he had started his own app company. Ultimately, after that podcast, Benjamin and I went into business together and became great friends. He helped me start Legacy Interviews. I ended up buying him out and now he runs multiple complicated businesses that are doing amazing things. Today in this podcast we're gonna talk about his real estate and working in the city and cameras and crime. We're also gonna talk about some of his biomedical work, which is where he's applying directed fields, things like MRIs and ultrasound, to not only diagnose people with cancers and things in their body they don't want, but also eventually hoping that they can use these technologies to impact them like medicine does right now. This is a fascinating conversation and it's an insight into the mind that is not encumbered by most of the things that other people are. Benjamin takes big chances, he has great ideas and he is one of those people that convinced me to create the interest based communications class that we just delivered last week. Interest-based communications is a philosophy, a way of understanding how to connect with other people, how to ask them about things they care about, how to learn, how to negotiate, how to deal with conflict.

Vance Crowe [00:01:47] And Benjamin had me develop that class for many of his scientists that work here in St. Louis, if you are interested in dramatically improving the way you communicate with other people, making yourself feel far more comfortable in a negotiation and even presenting your ideas so that other people wanna listen, go to Articulate Ventures slash IBC. Alright, without further ado, let's head

Benjamin Anderson [00:02:12] To the conversation with Benjamin Anderson. We're starting to pick out trees and how to lay out our backyard. Olga has a vision of having a permanent planted Christmas tree so that we don't need to like have one in the house and all of this. So there will just be a tree outside. So we've been looking at like, yeah, the different types of, I guess generally speaking, pine tree category and what's gonna grow best in Missouri. And so this is prompting me to catch up to you in terms of knowledge of trees. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:02:44] Like that's why like trees have no relevance to you until they do. And then all of a sudden you're like, there's a whole visual language on my drive everywhere I go that I can think of and, and I don't know, be a part of. So like I drive and I'm like, oh, catalpa. Oh, that one's drawing in a different way than most of them grow. Oh, there's a sycamore. Well, they've done a good job of managing those branches. 'cause normally they do that like, but before you can name which trees are, which they're all just trees.

Benjamin Anderson [00:03:14] How do you like identify the characteristics of a tree? Like starting from, is it trunk, is it the leaves? Or what are you looking at to narrow it in? First?

Vance Crowe [00:03:24] I think mo for the, you know, so leaves are like usually a dead giveaway, but there's also a lot that you can just see from the bark. And like once you get good at bark, bark ends up being a faster mechanism because when you look up at the leaves, sometimes tree branches are crossing over and you can't tell is that one, that one. And, and like the more you get into deeper varieties, like you get into maples, there's sugar maples, silver maples, black maples, red maples. And so like there becomes real nuance. And so you can kind of look at it and be like, all right, that one's some kind of maple. But you look at the bark and you're like, oh bingo, I know that's a red maple. 'cause that's the way red maple bark looks.

Benjamin Anderson [00:04:05] Hmm. You know, there's an interesting conversation going on downtown right now where, you know, there's a big push to do all of this sort of vacant building cleanup and some people are starting to pump the brakes on. We're going too far and tearing down buildings that are still salvageable. The market just won't support it yet. And so there's a little bit of a concerted effort that I'm starting to notice of saying that we should allocate this effort and these city resources towards tree coverage instead of vacant building cleanup.

Vance Crowe [00:04:37] Oh, interesting. So they're saying, Hey, instead of knocking buildings down, we should plant more trees.

Benjamin Anderson [00:04:41] Yeah, exactly.

Vance Crowe [00:04:43] Well it's cra So Missouri St. Louis is in an awesome place for trees because it's essentially an estuary. It's where the northern latitudes and the southern latitudes meet. And so you, you have the trees of the south and the trees of the north here. So the, the diversity of trees in St. Louis is unreal. And because of our like really humid weather, the trees do a really good job of growing here. So like the way that a tree impacts a space, like a vacant lot or a yard or whatever, like it's crazy how, how big of a deal. So plant them today, but you won't see the payoff for 20 years.

Benjamin Anderson [00:05:26] Yeah. Well and that's part of the problem is like nobody's planted trees up there for 20 years. And so now it truly is kind of like a, whatever you call it, like an urban desert where there's not really much tree coverage in a lot of areas up there. And so yeah, there's like this idea of, well, we can make these areas potentially more desirable to develop if we just get all of the old stuff that's crumbling down out of the way. But a lot of that old stuff that's crumbling down is built in such a way that we literally, whether we can't afford to or we don't know how to rebuild things of that quality. Yeah. Some babies are getting thrown out with the bath water up there. And so I think that this idea to like refocus the effort towards creating tree coverage and doing landscaping and stuff like this, because that's the whole like value proposition or idea behind the effort is let's make North City more desirable to do any development up here at all. And as a means of doing that let's like clear out vacant structures so that there's just blank canvases to paint on. But the problem is that there's not very many good artists in the development world right now that are painting beautiful things on the blank canvases of vacant lots.

Vance Crowe [00:06:32] Oh, interesting. And do you perceive that people would be more creative if they were working with what is already there?

Benjamin Anderson [00:06:40] I think so because I mean, like I was talking to a developer the other day where they're like, yeah, we're putting together a plan to build like 16 houses or something like that. And they're gonna be 16 cookie cutter, 600 square foot houses that are just gonna look all exactly the same. And he is got a block in a certain part of town and he is gonna put 'em all up on that block. And we're having this discussion about like whether or not we wanna see something like that in our area. And I don't hold the keys to what gets built over there by any means, but I'm thinking to myself, do I wanna see, you know, 16 plus cookie cutter houses side by side or do we wanna see some like more creative stuff?

Vance Crowe [00:07:20] You and I have talked about this before, but like creativity only comes from constraint, at least for me. Like I, if I'm given white blank page is very difficult for me to be like, ah, I will fill it with this thing. But if you have a, you know, a white page and then you've got a problem in it, now all of a sudden you can build off of that problem, you can now say like, all right, well we've gotta find a way to manage the things that are happening here. And of course that spirals out and it constrains you, but it's those constraints that you find creative resolution to. And so like wiping something away, making all of those lots as flat and as similar as possible means that they, they, there's almost no possibility there will be creative.

Benjamin Anderson [00:08:04] Well, and then the part of the problem probably then is that the only constraint that you're left to operate within and development is cost. And so cost is, you know, a constraint that if you're only operating off of that as the thing that's guiding how you build something to come to fruition, you're not exactly optimizing for quality on the opposite of cost. Are you like that's not

Vance Crowe [00:08:26] No, and you're def you're not even optimizing for some kind of like the, the range that you're doing. What do you call that? Like the, the horizon on what is possible is only so big be because it's just about this one dynamic price as opposed to like in my yard, the whole thing slopes downward. And when I first moved into the house, I was like, I don't, what do I care? Does it matter? But then you start realizing like, oh, this impacts how much shade a tree is going to give because one at the front of the yard versus the back of the yard, if they both grow 80 feet, that one will be 40 feet above it. And so you start saying like, okay, well which types of trees and how can I do this? Like all of those things make the con the final product so much more interesting than just how much money can I buy? How much money can I spend on trees? And I'll just spend as, as, as either little money as I can or my budget amount because there's nothing to prompt you to create from there.

Benjamin Anderson [00:09:26] Are there places you've visited where there are landscaping and the intentionality behind it influenced how you think about doing these things at your house?

Vance Crowe [00:09:34] Yeah, I mean the, the St. Louis botanical gardens is like one of the great national treasures that we have here. And they have all these different segments where it's like the Japanese garden, the English garden, you know, the various types of ways to think about trees. And one of the things that I learned from the English garden is they are beautiful but they are so controlled that it doesn't feel comfortable to me. It feels expensive but it doesn't feel comfortable. And as I drive through my own neighborhood or walk through my own neighborhood, I see most of the boomers have opted for that English garden very controlled.

Benjamin Anderson [00:10:16] It feels stiff. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:10:17] Yeah. Bushes, shrubs go here, tree goes in this island here we delineate that the tree is in this space but not this other space. And I'm not saying it's not beautiful, but it does not feel comfortable and you almost never see that with families, with children where the, where the kids are playing within the garden.

Benjamin Anderson [00:10:37] I really like the garden styles where, so Olga and I have been taking these walks to help inform like the landscaping decisions that we make. And so we're just kind of walking around some of the say more affluent neighborhoods in St. Louis and seeing all right, like how did people pattern the, the brick along the sidewalk or create like landscaping barriers between their neighbors and like we think we wanna do vine instead of grass in the front yard and do that whole thing. And so what are the different types of vines to pick? And so yeah, I really like how some people even in their front yards will create these little spaces where it feels like a micro forest and you have like that one chair that's just kind of like sitting there along like your own little custom path that you make and you can just go there and sit in your own little private forest and sit in your chair. And so that's kind of prompted Olga to even in the backyard think like she wants to have it not just be like flat mow grass but have it be sort of more wild brush with like a path that's cut running through it, figuring out how to manage that and then have some, you know, like few flowers.

Vance Crowe [00:11:41] So the the, there's two things that strike me on on this. The first one is I have a chair hiding under a bush in my front yard. I think nobody even knows it's there. And I go sit there because it is 15 degrees cooler there than anywhere else and I can see what the kids are up to. So I'm like totally down with this, the, the chairs that are hidden in a spot, the thing I will respond to on the vines. I'm totally that way. Right? I was definitely like, oh well who wants this archaic idea of grass? But the benefit that you get out of grass that you don't get with vines is you control insect populations in this way and that the offsetting thing to having vines are spiders.

Benjamin Anderson [00:12:21] Hmm.

Vance Crowe [00:12:21] And I didn't know this until I had a lot of vines and now all of a sudden I'm like, where the hell are all these spiders coming from? And

Benjamin Anderson [00:12:28] They're living in the vines. Oh

Vance Crowe [00:12:29] They're in the vines. And so like you find out that these things that you're like ah, the old ways of doing things, having lawns that are cut to two inches are are boring. But I also don't have ticks. And so this is where the only way you can learn this stuff is by doing it and being like, well we thought that was a good idea 'cause what may not work in my spot, what may result in ticks and spiders in my place may not in your urban environment. So you you, you can't even take the wisdom of other people. You have to just try things.

Benjamin Anderson [00:12:57] Yeah. And there's less and less inspiration for what to try because people don't quite have as much time in order to think about building a garden. Both because people my age I think are not living in places that they think that they're going to be for the next 20 years. They're like, I might be in this apartment or this house for the next two years. So there's not thought or a motivation to take effort towards putting together that space A and then B. Yeah, having the time, the time and the costs associated.

Vance Crowe [00:13:28] Yeah, I was 35 years old. I mean I had, this is my second house, so the first house I had, I was really constrained. There was one tree in the backyard, maybe I could plan another one but not really there. But then once I got into this house and I was like, oh I have this big canvas I can start planting things. It does change your relationship with time. Like now I wanna see that hickory tree growing season after season after season after season and seeing how it's responding to the sun and all of those things. And if you're living in an apartment doesn't make any difference to you if there'll be a tree there in 20 years or not.

Benjamin Anderson [00:13:59] Yeah. And how has having kids changed how you think about how much time that you have to allocate outside of your family?

Vance Crowe [00:14:06] Well the interesting thing about kids and time and trees is that I am thinking on multiple levels for those trees. I'm thinking about can I keep the tree surviving right now when the kids are little and you've gotta mow it. What will the tree be in five years when my 5-year-old is now 10 years old? So what kind of shade will it create? What will it do what about 10 years or 15 years? And then I have this huge gap where I'm saying what I hope happens, at least in my mind is that my children either take over my house or we buy more houses in our neighborhood and we create like a commune. This is like a pipe dream. But then what would I want my trees to be like? And I'm, I've already planted two trees that I'm like if I am still around to be a grandparent, this is gonna be the most baller place to ever have a tree house or the next owner will get it.

Benjamin Anderson [00:15:00] Well, so this is where we're at. At a certain point, if you're starting to like make plans of building a commune in your neighborhood, you start to say, well if I want the trees to be nice and the houses that I eventually want to buy, I still need to plant those trees now. But I don't own those houses yet or have you know, the control over those portions of the neighborhood in order to make everything else look potentially nicer. So how do you think about getting those trees planted?

Vance Crowe [00:15:24] I don't know. I mean the problem with the city doing any kind of planting or any kinda municipality is go up and down most city streets that tried to plant trees and they fail and they fail because the organizations say, oh imagine how pretty this would be if they were all elm trees or if they were all this kind of oak tree, right? Oh we'll get this great canopy. It'll be that perfect picturesque thing. But because you've planted all the same thing, if a disease comes in emerald ash b, now every single elm is out of there, you've now clear cut all those trees on that street line and now this is let that desert thing that you're doing. But in order to have an actual individual think about these trees, it's, it's real. You have to really know what you're doing to match a sycamore with a black cherry with a cottonwood and make it be coherent in a space. But that's the only way you're gonna do it with enough variety that one disease won't kill them all. You're never gonna get that out of a municipal arborist.

Benjamin Anderson [00:16:29] Yeah, I mean that makes sense. That's not exactly what they're optimizing for there is it?

Vance Crowe [00:16:35] No. So yeah, that's, I mean, but as somebody that owns the house, it's like I just get to plant them all the time. But on your thing is how do you get other people to do it? I don't know. I think you make it as easy as possible to plant trees. Like I took at one point in time and was like, Hey, I'll come up and plant trees for you if you wanna plant them right here in one of my neighbor's yards. And they took the hint. 'cause what I was really saying was, it's hot as shit out here when I take a walk in the neighborhood. And then they went and and resolved it on their own. But, but I don't know, I think the easiest way is to probably hand out trees and be willing to go dig holes.

Benjamin Anderson [00:17:09] Yeah, well there are groups that do that.

Vance Crowe [00:17:11] You describe where you're living as a commune. Do you, do you mean that literally? Well

Benjamin Anderson [00:17:15] I mean no, but you make the, you make the same joke of like I envision buying up other houses in the neighborhood and having my friends live in those houses. This is a hundred percent like the mission that we are on. Like what other property can we control that's walking distance from our house And you know, I'll rent that to anybody first come, first serve, but first come, first serve also includes me telling my friends first. So if any of my friends wanna live in housing that's right around the corner from us, dude,

Vance Crowe [00:17:42] What you're doing is wild. Like I, I can't even believe. So we did our first podcast. I went and looked it up this morning six years ago. People, Benjamin is my former business partner, one of my best friends, godfather my child. Like we're, we've known each other for a long time. As much belief as I have in you, I could not have believed you could take your neighborhood as far as you've taken it. You went into the place where it was like, there's a street in St. Louis called Delmar. If you're north of Delmar, that's where all the crime is. It's minority communities. People don't build there, they don't invest there. And before I even met you, you had bought a house and started renovating it so you could live in it 'cause it was $10,000 and you could afford that. And now you've started buying other houses, renovating them, getting people to rent them and your, you like your friends just bought a bar in the neighborhood and now they're starting to make it so there's gonna be a local hangout, there's a coffee shop not far from you. Like you guys are actually making the regeneration of North St. Louis in a way that most people would've laughed at you.

Benjamin Anderson [00:18:45] Well yeah, I think it takes like a little bit of the outsider looking in. Like whenever I saw the house over there, I am coming in from a different city and I'm saying that this is the neighborhood that I wanna live in because it has all of the stuff. And like even like investors that we work with now who aren't from the area, they're like, oh there's a Lululemon right there and there's a Jenny's right there and there's a whole foods right there. But then you go 10 blocks north and there's none of that stuff. But you can't see 'cause it's just a 10 block difference. Like whenever I was looking and I saw, I didn't even see the house for $10,000. I saw a house for 150 but it was still livable. But then 10 blocks south, it's the same exact house but it's not 150, it's like three times the price. Right? And so I'm moving here and I'm gonna be in school for the indefinite future and I'm like, well I could either pay rent into somebody's pocket for the foreseeable future or I could own property somewhere and have it appreciate in value and smarter to own property in a place where the appreciation might outpace inflation because there's like, you know, some, some value to capture there as the neighborhood comes up and got in and started doing stuff and everybody said, oh people thought the neighborhood's gonna come up for 20, 30 years. But yeah, I don't know, it's just seems like,

Vance Crowe [00:20:01] But I mean like for people that are not from St. Louis, you're in a rural area like it, it is absolutely impossible for somebody outside of St. Louis to describe to other people like this is no man's land. This is like crossing the demilitarized zone for most people from St. Louis where I live in the county, not in the city proper like north of Delmar. Like I remember when I went to visit you with my daughter and I made all those jokes about how we'll put her in, you know, a flack jacket and and armored carrier 'cause it was, it was genuinely like a rough place.

Benjamin Anderson [00:20:34] Yeah, I mean I hate to tell the stories of like how rough it is compared to like how much change has happened. Like I've been there for eight years now. So I can say for sure things have gotten a lot better, but I have literally seen people get killed with my own eyes. Like not joking. I've seen stuff going on outside from inside of my house and I'm on the phone with my dad and I'm saying, Hey, should I like call the police because there's an altercation going on outside that seems like it might get to a point where other people that aren't involved in the altercation should be worried about it. And he is like, no you don't, you're just, you don't wanna be the snitch in a neighborhood like that. Or I'm like, you know, the house next to mine is abandoned and there are people who sit on the block of the abandoned house and you know, do their stuff there. Right on my house was the abandoned house. And so not only that, people used to sit on my porch when I would come home, there would be like three or four dudes that I don't know

Vance Crowe [00:21:31] Sitting

Benjamin Anderson [00:21:31] On my porch because my house was the abandoned house and I've only been there for three or four months and there's no like respect yet. You know what I mean? And so you're coming home and my dad did the same thing whenever he was my age. And so he helped sort of like give me the soft skills to understand how do you participate and become a member of the community versus like just intrude in the community. And that was always what he said. He is like, you're not, you shouldn't come in with disrespect if people are sitting on your porch when you come home, you just introduce yourself, say what's your name man? Yeah. Like this is my house. I live here now. Like tell me about yourself. How long have you been here? What are you doing here? And slowly things change. Leaving your porch light on at night does a lot.

Vance Crowe [00:22:11] Why is that?

Benjamin Anderson [00:22:13] Well it shows that somebody's there and it creates visibility. The more porch lights that are on at night, I think in neighborhoods like ours overnight, like the more things start to sort of like change in a positive way just

Vance Crowe [00:22:28] Yeah, it's definitely a symbol of something, right? Like hey there's somebody here that makes me think of cameras, right? How do you feel about security cameras?

Benjamin Anderson [00:22:37] I was just talking about this with a good friend because we were talking about these types of cameras and kill switches and cars and just these types of technologies becoming more common. I don't have a definitive stance. What I'll say is I participated on like a neighborhood organization and we like had this decision where we're like, okay, well let's buy one of these cameras that's plugged into the city system, right? That is like part of the big brother network. And this was a desirable choice for us because we perceived that if one of these cameras was up on a light pole in our neighborhood, that activity that was not good for the neighborhood that was happening underneath that light pole very often would decrease. And

Vance Crowe [00:23:21] This is like drug dealing or shooting or prostitution or what? Yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [00:23:24] More, more like drug dealing and prostitution if anything. But like there's, there's not common shootouts. I mean those types of things happen but, and so we put it up and you know, wanna know what happened a week later

Vance Crowe [00:23:37] It

Benjamin Anderson [00:23:37] Was blown out with a shotgun

Vance Crowe [00:23:40] And

Benjamin Anderson [00:23:40] So then you have a choice, right? Because there's, what people don't know is that there's two different types of, of these cameras that you can buy. You can either buy them and they're functioning like they plug into the city's like actual camera network. Or you can actually also buy the ones that are just for show. And those ones only cost about a quarter of what the ones that plug into the city's network costs. And so I shouldn't be doxing this, but we had originally bought one of the ones that plugs into the city's network. And so that was kind of a shame that that one got blown out. And so now here we were and we're like, okay, well we know that we can't just let this go because if you concede to letting the camera be blown out, then like you lose and the riffraff just knows that they, they win that spot versus the thing that you gotta do in a situation like that is get a new one up as soon as possible. And so we did, we got another one up within a couple of weeks

Vance Crowe [00:24:33] And and like

Benjamin Anderson [00:24:34] And it,

Vance Crowe [00:24:35] How do you feel about it? I mean like, because it's a weird thing like you are capitulating to big Brother, right? And everything you see on YouTube is like, hey these flock cameras are bad. Hey look at what they're doing overreach. You got into a community, you started participating and making it better and then with the other community members you're like, let's add big brother here.

Benjamin Anderson [00:24:55] Yeah. Yeah. I mean like it's, it's like a hierarchy of needs type thing, right? And if you are living in a neighborhood that quite literally is like not always safe, then you're willing to sacrifice certain liberties in order to improve the safety in that area even if it's only temporary, right? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:25:15] My sense from these cameras is that it's not going to prevent anything, but it will give you a way to potentially get justice by knowing who did something. Is that the way you feel about it?

Benjamin Anderson [00:25:29] Not entirely. I would actually say that it is preventing things from happening in that area. And so it kind of becomes this like let's push the boundaries out game where you're like, okay, well if the, like my neighborhood, whenever I moved into it, I couldn't tell you the exact like vacancies because I don't have that data. But what I could tell you is whenever I moved into the neighborhood the number of tax contributing parcels was like less than 40%. So properties where their property taxes are like being paid now it's up over 65 I think as of like the 2024 will probably be over 70. So a lot more people are at the very least are paying their taxes over there. And so the only reason I say this is because it's like the things of like more porch lights on the street being kept on these types of cameras existing in a more broad swath of the community that we're talking about that makes it so that to your question of like does that actually stop what's going on? Or does that just make it so that you catch the people? I can't tell you for certain that it stops what's going on, but I'll tell you that a lot less stuff happens if the neighborhood is like covered by more lights and more cameras and more people living there who care about what's going on there.

Vance Crowe [00:26:35] All right, we're gonna take a quick break to talk a little bit about the project that I work on here when I'm not podcasting or doing interest-based communications classes. Here in this studio we record Legacy Interviews. This is where I sit down with individuals and couples to record their life stories so that future generations know their family history. Just a few weeks ago we had a fascinating deacon come in and talk all about his life, how he chose marriage, how he got involved in the church. It was an incredible adventure and I've since heard from his own children how powerful this experience was and how much they loved understanding parts of his story that they were around for but didn't really know what was going on. Imagine for yourself how many stories your parents, your grandparents might have that because the context hasn't been right, they haven't had a chance to bring it up. If you are interested in having me interview your parents here in St. Louis, go to Legacy Interviews dot com. We also offer online versions where a host will sit down with your parents online maybe because the travel won't work or there's some reason they can't make it. But the interviews are great and the stories will still be captured. So to learn more go to Legacy Interviews dot com,

Benjamin Anderson [00:27:51] Having the legacy interview, you know, really helps 'em open up.

Vance Crowe [00:27:54] I was surprised that the depth the questions went into and to see very authentic answers, I was watching it and I was like, whoa, okay, this is like a new side of Jay that's coming out. I can see like how much excitement it brought him to share the things that he has a hard time talking about. I think in a day-to-day conversation you won't be provoked to answer questions like that. I personally believe in cameras. I have them for my house. I don't like right now the way that my cameras are set up is that they stream to the cloud and then they come to my app, right? And this makes it so it's like, okay, easy to use, I put the cameras up, I hook 'em to my wifi and now I can look at it on my phone, but it also means that someone else has access to be able to look into all of the cameras that I have outside of my house, inside my house. And you think, I think it used to be that we could all say like, oh yeah, but who's gonna watch all of that? Whereas Zebra, there's so much information, but now ai, they're really

Benjamin Anderson [00:28:54] Good with AI now. Like I remember the like the, I'm looking at it and it's like man gets chased by dog, right? Like they'll, they will literally give you that descriptive of texts now or person rides by on bike or like someone stole your trees because someone like took some plants from the front yard of one of our properties one time. And we do too. We've got the cameras that go straight to the cloud and it is kind of nice to have that stuff.

Vance Crowe [00:29:17] But then the flip side of it is in my neighborhood, 'cause there had a couple of years ago there had been some robberies somewhere in, in our town and, and so people were like, we need to put cameras up. That's just all there is to it. Let's put 'em up at the front of the neighborhood. And I hated this idea even though I had just had kids and I'm, you know, concerned about security, i, I intentionally threw problems into the discussion and made it so hard that there's no way they were gonna get through it. Which is like, alright, so you wanna have a neighborhood camera Who controls that video feed? Can anyone access it? Do you have to own the house? What happens if somebody wants to know if his wife is having somebody come visit, you know, this house? Can you specifically give somebody a license plate and say, okay, this is what we wanna know. Like how much information can you grab off of that and who gets access to it? And by just throwing questions in I, I now know the inner workings Machiavelli in of neighborhood community groups is if you want something not to move forward, just ask questions because you won't be able to get enough consensus of people answering those questions.

Benjamin Anderson [00:30:24] And so was your concern that like more of this information would be voluntarily passed up? Were these

Vance Crowe [00:30:29] Like Yeah and ultimately I'm not worried like, because

Benjamin Anderson [00:30:32] If these were like, let's say it wasn't like cameras being brought in that are like, you know, city government or police cameras, but those are cameras that you and your neighbors like privately invested in and it was like a localized server where anybody in the neighborhood has access. Would you have a problem with that?

Vance Crowe [00:30:48] That's my primary problem, right? Like that's like giving somebody a vision, a god-like vision of what's going on in the community that they don't have. And now one of my neighbors was like, well I could put a camera up in my driveway right now pointing at the street and I could see everything you want. And you're like, you're right, you could and that we can't stop. But I personally don't want to be a part of a surveillance group that at the top of the street or wherever I I, to me it's just like, I don't want this. And, and like COVID iss a perfect example of it. Like how long is it before they say, well we couldn't sit outside your house and have a police officer there saying you're not allowed to go out but we can put a a license plate reader right there and if your car moves between these hours, we're gonna know you were you were moving. Like I don't want that, I don't, that's the level of control I don't want.

Benjamin Anderson [00:31:38] Yeah, I, I hear this and it's like easy I think for one to identify and say, well yeah, I of course would like not to be monitored by more people or to like give that power away. But at the same time again, if there's like actively safety issues, do you just relegate those safety issues to continue being the case or do you figure out like what systems need to be put in place to mitigate them even if they're temporary systems that get put in place? Like well

Vance Crowe [00:32:05] Those flock cameras have proven that when they go do, so, you know these flock cameras, right? They read your license plate, they're now finding out like, oh we can do an open records request and say who accessed the footage here? And it turns out the police chief is looking up his mistresses. If anybody else is stopping by our house, they're finding people that don't have warrants against them so that way they can go look 'em up. Like there's all these things that can come up of it that are clear intrusions that make me like the bar. It better be really high. It'd better be that we're stopping active prostitution, active drug dealing

Benjamin Anderson [00:32:42] Well in our neighborhood. I guess

Vance Crowe [00:32:44] Going back to your

Benjamin Anderson [00:32:45] Point of like living in something of the wild west, those are actively the things that are beginning stopped drug dealing and prostitution

Vance Crowe [00:32:52] To me, I am working on now trying to have a closed circuit camera system at my house because I would love to be the only one my wife and I to be, to be the one with the vision of God that I can look at everything and have no one else have that.

Benjamin Anderson [00:33:09] I kinda like it in my, in my neighborhood on rental properties because now it's not just my house, right? Like I have these on everything And I guess like candidly it is probably like a little bit of a, even if that power doesn't go to the government, it's like now I can see whenever renters are coming in and out and like these sorts of things. And I'm not saying that I'm watching those things all the time, but those same notifications come in, like someone comes in, someone comes out. That's an interesting idea to try to localize it so that like I use Google and it's going into Google servers and Google's AI is sending me my notifications. But if that was localized, that would be neat.

Vance Crowe [00:33:44] I think so much is gonna get localized. I like I right now the the barrier that's keeping me from just jumping straight in on the video cameras is I'm actually looking for a much larger, more robust system. So I'm not technical but I can make things with ai, I can make almost anything happen. But I believe we're gonna have servers at our houses that are privately kept the same way you would keep an appliance, like a washing machine or a microwave. You're gonna have one that is your giant servers that allow you to store camera footage, medical records, tax information, like all of that stuff you won't

Benjamin Anderson [00:34:23] Shut cloud. Why am I paying Apple 10 bucks a month to store all my photos? Yeah, exactly.

Vance Crowe [00:34:26] 'cause they get it all right. And they can also shut you off from that and like, I mean I just did a phone transfer this week where I bought a new phone, I haven't bought one in four years or something like that. And you're sitting there being like, oh God, oh god, if my authenticator app doesn't make the switch over there, I'll be locked out of everything. Like it's really nerve wracking to have handed over all of this power to all these other apps or these companies that could just cut you off if they want to.

Benjamin Anderson [00:34:50] Have you done that with your photos yet? Do you have them like on a home server?

Vance Crowe [00:34:53] No, this is what I, this is like photos, video and then medical records.

Benjamin Anderson [00:34:57] Yeah, getting, getting like our actual wedding photos and wedding video was the thing that actually prompted me to extract from the, like I had everything in Google. I actually had Google and Apple, I'm paying like $10 a month for Apple and then like you know, $2 a month for Google or whatever and I just am running them both for redundancy and because you know who's gonna try to figure out how to cancel it for two bucks at least for me. And so then yeah getting gigabytes and gigabytes of beautiful wedding photos that never wanted to lose or let go of or have something mess up because like I was an early user of notion not to dog on notion, but I remember like that being my note universe and that's like where I digitized all of my handwritten stuff and that's where I was like doing my daily journaling and I was like fully invested and there was like actually a real server issue where my stuff got lost and I was like, I have invested 18 months into pouring my like brain bits and digital matter into this universe and now it's just gone. I was so livid that this is what prompted me to like lean forward into things like obsidian as far as like all right, well

Vance Crowe [00:36:08] Local storage. Yeah I storage everything on,

Benjamin Anderson [00:36:10] I went to my,

Vance Crowe [00:36:11] All my servers. Yeah the like the, the big challenge of it's just like Bitcoin, right? If you store everything on your own servers, there's not gonna be somebody that's gonna come along and be like, well the problem here is this thing right here if something breaks and like that's been, that's like the nerve wracking thing but I don't know the alternative is, is trusting that there's never gonna be a server problem or the company won't get sold. I mean all of my DNA, you know I, I did the 23 and me

Benjamin Anderson [00:36:42] And

Vance Crowe [00:36:42] 23 and me was sold and they did some really screwy things so that that way they could sell just the user data out of that. And so now that's, that's out. It's out in the open, right? Somebody else can go grab my DNA, I don't know what they can do with it but it doesn't feel great that it's out there.

Benjamin Anderson [00:36:57] Yeah, I'm surprisingly unfamiliar with like that whole situation,

Vance Crowe [00:37:01] The story of 23 and me.

Benjamin Anderson [00:37:03] Yeah, I mean I know that they sold and there's,

Vance Crowe [00:37:05] Yeah see they were operating is essentially at a loss to be able to collect all this 23 and me data 'cause they thought that they were gonna get FDA approval to have people like me say, oh now I have my DNA now I can use a doctor that's gonna use my DNA and give me specialized medicine. But they couldn't get the FDA to agree that this was like their, their modeling, their sampling of the DNA was correct enough to use as a medical diagnosis. So this collapses the value of the company. Yeah.

Benjamin Anderson [00:37:35] So

Vance Crowe [00:37:36] Then they're like well what's the most valuable thing we have? Let's sell that. Oh it's all the user data.

Benjamin Anderson [00:37:41] Hmm, that's interesting. We're we're like actively becoming aware of the same problem like just like a week ago, you know whoop the bracelets like oh right now well there you go. Well so whoop can now give you blood pressure data and they were not previously able to because there's like a fine line between being a unquote wellness product as far as like how you're regulated by the FDA and what hoops you need to jump through in terms of like, like say with the whoop there that like that if you're on this

Vance Crowe [00:38:14] A whoop just for anybody that doesn't know, you know like you have Apple watch that that has a little sensor on the back of it and it's always checking your VO two max and your all these things. I did not want to have an Apple watch 'cause they didn't want the screen on there but you can get just what's called a whoop strap and it will just track everything, your movement, your sleep, your blood pre I guess your blood pressure. So, so take it from there.

Benjamin Anderson [00:38:35] Yeah but that is like an active debate like that was last week that it wasn't like a fight but FDA basically like dropped their case because they were pushing up against whoop and saying hey if you're going to actually give people control over this data that could be used to self-diagnose certain medical issues, you are not a wellness product anymore. You're a medical device, you're like a class whether it's one, two or three medical device and if you're a class one, two or three medical device and not a consumer wellness product that's assigning a arbitrary score to something like sleep quality or blood pressure as a proxy to just avoid this arbitrary distinction, then there's all of these additional regulatory hoops that you need to jump through like getting your, you know, software architecture audited and having, having certain cybersecurity controls or usability testing

Vance Crowe [00:39:27] And there is zero chance that whatever controls they're putting on there are making the products better.

Benjamin Anderson [00:39:35] Yeah, I don't know if I would say zero chance but because like what's the steel man for something like usability testing? I was talking to another founder that was like I just had to outlay seven figures like so millions of dollars towards having one of these other companies test my medical device in order to like put one of these reports together to say how usable it is. And so like the steelman for like why should a company need to do that at all? Well if you think of a physician who's like maybe not getting very much sleep or like very, very busy running between patients, you want that device to be as clear and direct to use as possible so that there's no room for confusion where if I hit this button two times instead of one time I'm doing something that could like harm my patient versus help my patient.

Vance Crowe [00:40:24] But I would say the counterbalance to this of like yeah but the doctor he needs really up to date good medical records. Right? What you also have done, so the the FDA thing, I'm familiar with this but it happened before whoop. So for kids there are a thing called an outlet and you can attach basically a fitness tracker to their foot and that will tell you what their oxygen oxygenation in their blood is, right? And so if your child has RSV, which if you don't have kids usually don't know the actual terror of this, this is where when you go into the room at 3:00 AM they're going and you're like alright is this a I need to take them outside so that that way their lungs can cool down and they'll not do this or do I need to take them to the emergency room? Right? You don't know because you can't see the O2 oxygenation of their blood. Well the outlet was originally released not having the FDA approval and then all of a sudden it was supposed to, well what they did was they took all the outlets that were not outlets that were not used and they just turned them off. So the day that my child comes down with RSV, we go to put this thing on it and my wife's app is like bricked. Oh and it's like bricked because of the FDA, right? And so now you're like, oh thanks FDA you made sure that every box was checked and now we don't know what the oxygenation level of my child is. Fuck you. Yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [00:41:48] I get it, I get it. That's like it's, I mean we are actively like coming up against these same things of like what are the barriers that you wanna push up against here? Because it sounds like this company, had they done the regulatory research, they might have known that they were releasing a product where that was a real risk vector that they should have known is on the horizon and taken responsibility for and that's what gave you a negative user experience. Now I'm in the same boat as like the company and saying all of these additional hoops that I might need to jump through that leads to like eight figures in regulatory consultant expenses versus just being able to build a product and give it to a consumer so that they can self-diagnose certain health problems. I share that frustration but I also like know what the landscape is and that was an avoidable problem on their part to either like be able to know what those things are.

Vance Crowe [00:42:39] This is the conclusion that you must reach if you are going to be an entrepreneur like you are right with your company, you

Benjamin Anderson [00:42:47] Have to accept,

Vance Crowe [00:42:48] You can't have the approach that I have which is like, well I'm not, I'm, I am only facing that the government is taking things away and you're like, well if I get frustrated and fight that system, I will spend all of my time and energy fighting the system as opposed to capitulating where then I could eventually sell a product.

Benjamin Anderson [00:43:05] You could fight these systems as long as you wanna fight them depending on what hills you wanna die on and choosing what hills to die on. Like I think about it for us and I would really like to be like a, like what SpaceX was to the FAA for the FDA and like you know, SpaceX chose what rules that were hampering progress or like what battles to fight that would lead to the highest leverage unlocks for them to be able to like create more progress faster in the future if that makes sense. But then there are some things where it's like yeah this might be annoying but we've gotta bite the bullet and do this because yeah we wanna get like rockets into space and ship stuff up there and make money doing so.

Vance Crowe [00:43:46] So why don't we catch everybody up on who your company is and what you guys are trying to do.

Benjamin Anderson [00:43:52] Yeah, I've got a company called ION now and our objective is to bring the aging process under biomedical control

Vance Crowe [00:44:00] And that's a a witty way of saying you're trying to slow aging.

Benjamin Anderson [00:44:06] Yes. We are out to do that. The way that we're exploring doing this now is that well, so actually through working with you, a good entry into sort of like the domain of stuff that we're doing is we had on a scientist named Michael Levin, right? And he was a developmental biologist, developmental biologists. And so what Mike was looking at are the electrical communication patterns that cells are using to coordinate towards the shared goals of like let's build this body shape now or let's do this process or let's do this other thing and and

Vance Crowe [00:44:51] That's because right now our current model of cells is a cell is independent and it doesn't have a mouth and it doesn't have ears. So how is it that it communicates this is what I'm doing, what are you doing and how can we work together to achieve some desired state? We wanna all be a liver cell. We can't all be the surface liver cell, we've gotta be different types of liver cells,

Benjamin Anderson [00:45:15] Right? And so yeah, I mean the current drug discovery pipeline is sort of representative of this single cell view where the way that people do drug discovery is there's this complex network of interactions between proteins inside of the cell where you know, this gene codes for this protein and this protein is gonna move around and it's gonna latch onto this gene and it's gonna encode another protein and so on and so forth. And this is like the web that whenever people are doing drug discovery you will say okay well whenever someone has this disease there is more of this protein inside of the body, right? And I'm keeping things like super, super high level. And so what then people will look for is say like what are drugs that I might be able to introduce into the body that are going to bind either with this protein or a different protein that's like higher up in this chain of interactions that's going to lead to the expression being different than what it is in the disease state. Like that is it. And so the problem is with translating these things is that yeah you start with like does the drug bind to the individual protein and then you go to test these things in cells and you find that there's like a huge drop off between like whether or not a drug binds with just the protein isolated or the protein inside of the cell because the environment of the cell is very different than just like the protein isolated. And then you're like, okay well if it does bind in the cell at all, then you go and maybe you're doing this in a tissue model or even maybe then you go straight to mice.

Benjamin Anderson [00:46:51] But then the environment of where that drug goes to do its work is way different inside of a mouse than it is when it's just one cell type inside of a cell culture. Right? And so this is where you have these various levels where like drugs don't make it through the discovery process and

Vance Crowe [00:47:06] 'cause they worked, the people may be really excited when you're putting it into one cell. I mean I'm like, look what we can make it do. And then as you get into a more and more complicated way to put the drug in there, then it doesn't work the way 'cause there's, there's confounding factors,

Benjamin Anderson [00:47:21] Right? And this is like what got me so excited about this let's say bioelectricity domain whenever we had Mike on the podcast for the first time a few years ago because he's doing very, very simple interventions still with drugs but with drugs that are targeting for specific proteins called ion channels or gap junctions that are proteins that are inside of the cells membranes. So like think like the cell's skin. And so these are the proteins where ions like sodium, potassium, calcium are moving in between cells. And so the rate at which those ions move between cells or the amount of ions that move between cells is one of the ways that not just individual cells but all of the cells inside of a tissue or an organ or a system inside of your body is using to coordinate towards, again like the shared goal of like let's be this cell type. Now let's

Vance Crowe [00:48:15] This, so lemme see if I understand this. You're saying inside of a cell it has a certain amount of potassium or sodium we'll say

Benjamin Anderson [00:48:22] And

Vance Crowe [00:48:22] If it wants to communicate something it could release potassium which would then change the electrical bridge between it and some other cell.

Benjamin Anderson [00:48:34] Yeah. So I kind of, I draw an analogy to like temperature, right? We're in a room and you think it's what, 70 degrees in here right now we cannot see all of the underlying thermodynamic reactions that are giving rise to 70 degrees. But we can look at how much mercury volume is being taken up inside of a thermometer in order to get an idea of like the temperature based off of like how that temperature changes the properties of the mercury and the thermometer, the types of things that we will look at and like you've come by, you've been by our lab and you've seen these things. So we're looking at yeah the me basically the voltage difference across the cells membrane. And we are looking at that in order to infer how much calcium or how much potassium or how much sodium or how badly it wants to move across that membrane. Does that make sense?

Vance Crowe [00:49:25] So you are measuring how much potassium is inside of the cell based on how much electricity is being conducted between that cell and another cell because

Benjamin Anderson [00:49:33] These are charge carrying particles, that's what gives rise to the electrical activity. Like sodium has a charge and potassium has a charge and calcium has a charge whether it's positively charged or negatively charged. And so the amount of something like potassium, which is positively charged in a given area is going to change this electrical potential between cells.

Vance Crowe [00:49:56] And so the work that you guys are doing is saying we are gonna spend a lot more time and energy understanding what does the electricity between cells tell us about what needs to change.

Benjamin Anderson [00:50:09] Yeah. So if you have a rough understanding of how neurons work, right? Like neurons are firing electrical signals between each other very, very fast. And the patterns of change in those electrical signals is more or less what gives rise to like your experience as an individual. And so every single cell inside of of your body is doing that same thing. It's firing these electrical signals, but it's happening much slower than neurons so whereas neurons are firing on the order of milliseconds, your skin cells might be exchanging electrical signals on the order of say like minutes to in some cases hours. And so whenever I'm saying firing electrical signals, a way to ground that is, just think of it like a waveform, right? Like the how fast are we hitting peak or trough amplitudes as the wave is being exchanged between these cells.

Vance Crowe [00:51:03] And what have you guys discovered so far?

Benjamin Anderson [00:51:07] So our core objective has been developing the capability in order to not just change these things with drugs or gene therapies or anything like this, but rather be able to bring about these changes with fields. So being able to apply either acoustic, so ultrasound directly to tissue in order to get specific things to happen or electromagnetic fields to tissue to get these things to change. So

Vance Crowe [00:51:35] Is this like a ray gun? You want to figure out how can we take an acoustical sound or are you putting them in a concert? What does this mean?

Benjamin Anderson [00:51:43] So I'll talk through what the setup that we've been using so far Looks like for something like acoustics, you have cells inside of a dish and you have an ultrasound transducer. And so what's happening is energy is being ran to that transducer and that is causing the transducer to vibrate in such a way that mechanical, like you and I, we're exchanging mechanical waves. Right now my mechanical waves are hitting

Vance Crowe [00:52:09] Meteor ears, but the ultrasound is at a wave that's higher than what you can hear. Yeah.

Benjamin Anderson [00:52:12] Way, way higher frequency.

Vance Crowe [00:52:13] But it, it is still making motion that right things are Yeah, impacted by

Benjamin Anderson [00:52:18] Yes, that's right. And so those fields will get transferred to the cells and that will get things to change in the cells. And so like say one of the ways that people ground this in a concrete mechanism for things like ultrasound is that that pro same proteins that I was talking about before that are inside of the membrane or like the skin of the cell that allows these ions to move back and forth between cells, these mechanical waves will hit these proteins and cause the protein shapes to change. And if the protein shape changes then this makes it like more easy or less easy for these ions to move between cells.

Vance Crowe [00:52:56] And so where does this go? This is the idea that there are some cells that are not moving these potassium sodium things around properly. And so you're opening a gate or closing a gate

Benjamin Anderson [00:53:11] Sort of. So like the types of ideas that we're basing our exploration off of and there's work on this stuff that goes back to before we even knew what the structure of DNA looked like, like I think it was 1952 that we discovered the structure. I could be wrong on that, but like let's say at some point we figure out what DNA looks like, everybody gets really excited and we say this is where all of the information that encodes form and function for biology exists is in this DNA thing. That being said before this, there were all kinds of different schools of thought where people were doing stuff more in line with what I'm talking about in order to say, well we don't have a complete model of what's going on in biology yet. And so we're like changing the electrical properties of non excitable tissue to see what valuable things we can get to happen. And so for example, there was a guy named Clarence Cone in the seventies who he was doing simple experiments like this, but he wasn't doing them with fields, he was just doing it with like salts. And so inside of cells you, the cells are inside of a media which is just like the liquid environment where like all their food and nutrients exist. And so you can change the salt concentrations in order to do these same things because if you're changing the, yeah, like just the extra cellular environments, concentration of the thing, things like this that are being used in order to communicate between cells, you can change these electrical properties and if these electrical properties change, that was like the research question of like what happens to the cell. And so what was found is that you can hyperpolarize cells so you can increase their negative charge to a certain degree where they will stop dividing entirely.

Benjamin Anderson [00:54:52] Or on the flip side of the spectrum, you can increase the positive charge of cells and you can get them to increase the rate at which they divide. And then there are some types of cells inside of your body that don't divide at all like neurons. And what Clarence Cone found is that if he depolarized neurons within a certain threshold, he wouldn't actually get the cells to successfully divide into two complete cells, but he got neurons to do something called nucleation. So, or like they would bi nucleate. And so the nucleus inside of the cell where all of the genetic information lives, they would get another copy to be made again just by changing like the electrical properties of the cell. And so these are like pretty radical thing that things that you can get to happen with biology, if you can turn this knob in the hyper polar direction or in the depolarized direction, you can either get them to stop dividing or to increase the rate at which they divide. And so one of our core hypotheses is that if we get the ability to change this pattern over time and not just say we wanna push it more negatively charged or we wanna push it more positively charged, but rather we might wanna, you know, hyperpolarize it for five minutes and then depolarize it for 10 minutes and then vice versa and change this waveform that we're talking about that we can characterize certain states of the cells function that are related to these like patterns of change over time. And then we can impose this pattern of change sort of top down with fields in order to get a more complex set of state changes to take place in cells.

Vance Crowe [00:56:24] Okay. So what I hear you saying about this is that it's not just that you can point your ray gun the ultrasound at it and either choose to make it nucleate and create two nucleuses, but now you're talking about doing it in in an order that can make something happen. There have to be such an unbelievable amount of variables. How do you ever hope to be like, well we'll do it for five minutes, then we're gonna shutter down, then we'll do five more minutes. Like how will you ever make those discoveries?

Benjamin Anderson [00:56:56] Because

Vance Crowe [00:56:57] It's kinda like a recipe, right?

Benjamin Anderson [00:56:59] Kind of. I mean, yeah, I mean you're so like let's say that we want to, so a, a pilot that we're setting up right now with an awesome scientist who actually comes from Mike's lab, her name's Roha Murugan. And so one of the core things that's makes the type of work that we're doing different from like what's still going on inside of the Levin lab is that we're really making this bet on using fields as a modality in order to get these changes to happen. And so when I'm saying fields, I'm saying like the ultrasound or the electromagnetic waves, the challenge that comes with that is that there is not equipment that you can buy off of the shelf to answer these questions. I can't just like go to Thermo Fisher and say Yeah, please give me the field application device that I can put my cells inside of to, to test things. And so at our lab we actually spend a lot of time building the equipment in order to be able to answer these questions at all. But so going back to your question of like what does this process look like? So there are cells that are involved in, you know, immune system function called macrophages. So one specific example of a run of work that we're standing up is doing a proof of concept to say let's look at the transition in these cells from what's called the M1 state to the M two state. And so we want to characterize what this transition looks like by looking at these patterns of change over time that I'm talking about. And so like for us that means that we're putting dyes into the environment where the cells live.

Benjamin Anderson [00:58:34] Or like we've, we've got 16 different reporters that we use in order to sort of like characterize these things that we wanna look at. But just to keep the like analogy simple, like let's say that we're putting a dye in the environment, that dye is localizing itself inside of the cell somewhere. And then what we're able to do is we can put those cells over a microscope and we can excite them with light and whenever we excite them with light, we're getting a response or a return signal in light as well. And then what we can do is we can calibrate the intensity of that light to the underlying thing that we care about. And so that's like how we're getting the information. And so then what we're doing is we're like taking ourselves and we're in a normal way. So like the normal way that you get the types of things that that we're talking about to change are like, like going back to what I was saying, you might just put other chemicals inside of the environment where the cells live. And so then you might say, well you know, why don't we just do that inside of the body? Well we do a lot with drugs but like one of the problems is is that like you can't really control how long a drug lasts or where it does its thing very well once it gets inside of the body you might put the drug in through like orally or you might inject it somewhere. And I'm keeping things simple 'cause we could go into vaccines and all of these sorts of things, right? But controlling the spatiotemporal effects of what changes you want to get to take place inside of biology is like not really a solved problem yet. So that's kind of like another really big component of why we're making this bet on fields.

Vance Crowe [01:00:07] I mean what you are proposing and when you say we're making this bet on fields is the introduction of a new modality of medicine at all. Right? So like we use chemistry, we use radiation now.

Benjamin Anderson [01:00:21] Yeah. Our bet is on physics.

Vance Crowe [01:00:23] Your bet is on physics. What do you mean by that?

Benjamin Anderson [01:00:25] I mean that we think that the leverage behind physics as a way to bring about change in biology is way, way. We think that lever is way longer than chemistry's lever

Vance Crowe [01:00:38] And that we will look back on the chemistry as like, well that was a limited thing. We couldn't do things 'cause I remember when you and I were talking about my cancer, right?

Benjamin Anderson [01:00:46] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:00:46] Now if I wanted to use radiation to have tried to slow that, they would do a thing where they would put little flex of gold inside of the tumor. And if they do three then you have the XY and the Z axis. And so then they say in between these three point the radiation right at this point. And then you hope that you keep it narrow enough to not radiate other healthy cells, but you're using that radiation to try and burn away essentially the, the part of the cancer that's kicking off negative cells. What would fields do differently than radiation?

Benjamin Anderson [01:01:25] Well, so radiation like in the way that you're describing it is sort of like, or not sort of, it is a form of field that's being applied. I would say that like the domain that we're exploring that's different than this is like go back to our hyperpolarization example, this like, it sounds pretty sci-fi but it's not totally unprecedented. Like there are some other companies out there that are doing things with fields because you know, and you can do these things very effectively in a dish. One of the problems becomes translating it to people. So say like you take some cells in a dish, and this is one of the things that informs like the types of fields that we're looking for to get things to work is like there's a company called Novocure. They're publicly traded, they do hundreds of millions of dollars a year and they're something that people who have cancer, they might use Novocure devices in order to apply fields to places where cancer is at in the body to slow down the rate at which the cancer grows. And so to your question of like what makes our quote unquote like fields different is that we're sort of like looking to translate the level of efficacy that we can see like, like testing fields in a dish to working in deep tissue because that's sort of like an unsolved problem of being able to say like there's a marble sized tumor somewhere, it may be inches below your skin's surface. And we want to be able to apply very, very specific like energy parameters to that region of tissue to get the tissue to change in the ways that we want it to change.

Benjamin Anderson [01:03:00] And like people have cared about this, but this is like a relatively unmapped domain. And so that's a lot of the work that we're doing is saying like, okay, what are the different ways that we want to be able to change cells in general, right? A and then B, what are the ways we can get those changes to happen tested inside of a dish with fields? And most importantly are the fields that work for getting those changes to happen in cells in a dish going to translate to working in deeper levels of tissue in the body. Because the problem that you will have with translating a lot of this work is that these fields will attenuate or they'll like spread out as soon as they come into contact with your skin. And so if you're wanting to apply very specific energy parameters to tissue below your skin, you yeah, you like need to take into account like the physics behind like how those fields propagate through space to be able to apply the energy that you want to, to get the things you want to happen to happen.

Vance Crowe [01:04:05] So very recently, midjourney, which was the company that did the, they, they were one of the first image generators using ai. They came out and said, Hey, we're we're gonna change the world using ultrasound. I know you are using ultrasound. What, where are they at and what's the difference between what they're doing and what you're doing? Yeah.

Benjamin Anderson [01:04:26] So they're, they're using ultrasound as a way to see what's going on inside of the body. And so the device that Midjourney revealed a couple weeks ago is, yeah, they're applying these ultrasound waves and like you've got an ultrasound probably to image like where Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:04:43] Embryos.

Benjamin Anderson [01:04:43] Yeah, yeah, well where your can you got it for your cancer as well? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:04:47] Oh yeah. Gotcha.

Benjamin Anderson [01:04:48] Well, so yeah, you can use ultrasound in order to propagate through tissue and get a return signal in order to see the shape of what's going on inside of the body. And so that is effectively what they built. They built a device that you can go inside of and they claim that in like 60 to 90 seconds, that device is going to, I'm wanting to say scan, but really it's going to apply ultrasound fields to your body. And then those fields are going to bounce back and be received in such a way that we're able to infer the shape of what's going on inside of the body.

Vance Crowe [01:05:20] And so their proposal was like, you'll be able to go into a, like a bath essentially and you'll get an image of your insides. Is that what they're trying to do?

Benjamin Anderson [01:05:29] Yeah, that's, that's where it gets back into like this regulatory world of like, and I don't know exactly how Midjourney is thinking about this, but like say if you launch a device like this inside of a spa, which is what they have mentioned they're gonna do, they're gonna have a pilot location in San Francisco where you can go and you can get in this machine for again, 60 to 90 seconds and you're gonna get like one of these body composition scans. Like there's a, there's a line between like are you giving the consumer enough information to self-diagnose their own medical issues? Because if you are then you need to go through like the FDA and you know, get approved as a medical device and all of the proper ways in order to be able to do so. Or are you giving them sort of like the arbitrary measure of like measure like some, you know, like wellness score, body composition score that's giving them like still actionable but like much more general information, if that makes sense.

Vance Crowe [01:06:23] And the difference between what they're doing and what you're doing, if I understand correctly, is not just with ultrasound, but your belief is you don't just have to use this as a reading material as a way to read what is inside. Yeah. You also could use it as a way to deliver, you could write on those cells.

Benjamin Anderson [01:06:41] Yes, that's right. So we've got a couple of engineers in Germany that actually built a prototype that's like not, like not on the par with like what Midjourney has come out with, but basically a, we called it a bacta tank. Like if you've seen Star Wars, the liquid tank that people will go into whenever they're injured and it's got the right chemical solutions in the environment and they're healing inside of it. So this was like temporary run of Project batna where it was basically just an ultrasound scanner and you're laying in a saline solution and that ultrasound scanner is moving underneath your body in order to do the same mapping. And so like what's our vision? What do we, what do we think the shape of the solution for the thing that we're building is going to look like? Like you've gotten an MRI scan before, right? And so did you know that the guy who came up with the MRI was doing bioelectricity research on the kidney in St. Louis whenever he came up with the idea, or I don't know if it's fair to say when he came up with the idea, but Raymond do, the guy who came up with the MRI was doing research on bioelectric bioelectric properties of kidney in St. Louis, you know, probably would've been 60, 70 years ago now. And he is paying attention to developments of imaging technology and physics. And so it'd be a whole nother rabbit hole to go down like the set of ideas that got Raymond Damadian to sort of like care about the differences and bioelectric properties of cancerous tissue versus healthy tissue. But suffice it to say that we're talking about changes in the concentrations of these things like potassium, sodium, calcium.

Benjamin Anderson [01:08:13] He noticed that there was a marked difference in the concentration of specific ions inside of healthy tissue as opposed to cancerous tissue. And because this was the case, the structure of the water matrix inside of those cells, so like the bonds between Yeah, the, the water inside of the cells is different because of this as well and because this is different. He was like, oh well we have this, this technique that's come out in physics called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. And maybe what we can do is we can build a device that is using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging in order to non-invasively see where cancer is at inside of the body because of how the structure of water inside of cancer is different from healthy tissue. And so to like give a quick verbal run through of like how an MRI machine works, it's like whenever your body is inside of an MRI machine, there is a super, super strong magnetic field that is pointed in one direction. And so then the big ring that you're inside of is a radio frequency coil. And so like picture that the magnetic field that's in one direction is pushing all of the protons inside of the water inside of your body in, in that same direction, right? And so now all of your pro your water protons are polarized in the direction of that magnetic field. And so then what's happening whenever you're getting an MRI scan is perpendicular to that field, you are pinging it with a frequency of fields in order to destabilize the orientation with the magnetic field of those protons in the water matrix.

Benjamin Anderson [01:09:52] And so then in kind of the same way, like with we were talking about with mid journeys machine where the ultrasound, the mechanical waves will bounce back and this lets you image the shape of the environment. This is what happens inside of an MRI machine because you'll, you know, you'll ping and then these pings will bounce back and they'll be received. And this allows you to be able to determine the shape of what's going on inside of the body and like properties like the, the, the amount of time that it takes for the protons inside of water to reorient with the magnetic field. And so the core thing that's different is that yeah, in healthy tissue versus cancerous tissue, the rate at which those protons will reorient is different. So the amount of time that it takes, and that's how we know where cancer's at inside of the body.

Vance Crowe [01:10:38] And so the long-term vision is not just looking inside the body to find cancer.

Benjamin Anderson [01:10:43] Yeah. So the reason I brought up Raymond Damadian in the MR MRI is because as he was building this machine, he envisioned this to be something that was not just capable of seeing what's going wrong in the body, but also being able to do things from within the same form factor. So picture, if you could go get an MR MRI and that MRI is not just seeing where problems might exist inside of the body, but during the same MRI session fields might be being applied in order to correct without ever having to do any, any chemotherapy or surgery at all. What is wrong?

Vance Crowe [01:11:18] What do you think the likelihood is of that dream coming true?

Benjamin Anderson [01:11:24] I mean that's our life's mission. That's, that's that is the mission of our company. So we will have failed if that dream does not come true.

Vance Crowe [01:11:30] And when that happens, how does the world change?

Benjamin Anderson [01:11:39] That's a good question. I kind of say it hyperbolically and I'm, I, you know, this is way, way more speculative than like what we're talking about. But when I say, I say this hyperbolically, when people are asked like, you know, what's the KPI of success for you guys? I'm like, okay, so the year is 2100. There are a billion people on earth that are chronologically over the age of one 50, but biologically they are more representative of a 25 to a 45-year-old. That's a crazy version of the future. And that's like way

Vance Crowe [01:12:13] Out. Do you think people will regress in age or should everybody be doing everything they can to stay as young as they can? Because all the machine is gonna give you is you won't go forward. You'll just, so to

Benjamin Anderson [01:12:24] Be clear, we're way in sci-fi land now. So I'm like, I'm not, I'm not dying on any of the hills I'm standing on. We're like speculating together. So like let's say, let's say that because what's one of the reasons that people wanna get these MIDJOURNEY scans? It's so that you can get like when's the last time you got an M MRI machine? How often do you get or an MRI scan?

Vance Crowe [01:12:42] I mean I'm a little four months ago,

Benjamin Anderson [01:12:44] Four months ago. Okay, well how many MRI scans have you gotten in your entire lifetime?

Vance Crowe [01:12:48] Two two

Benjamin Anderson [01:12:49] E Exactly right. How much more would we know about the state of your body and like, you know, the trajectory of your health if you had gotten one scan a week for the last 20 years? 'cause you're what, 40? I don't know the answer to that question, but the hypothesis is is that like if we get more and this we're like big data and AI and all these sorts of things start to come in, is that if we're getting more of that data over time and getting the trajectories of change inside of your body as it's happening, that we're going to learn things that we don't really even have like the models to think about now

Vance Crowe [01:13:25] That you'll see like ion blocks or things that you wouldn't normally see and you probably, as you get to do better at that, you could probably do other types of testing that would tell you more and more about it.

Benjamin Anderson [01:13:35] Yeah. And so Michael Levin has a really good framing for like aging in this bioelectric sense where it's like, let's say that your cells have a goal, the morphological goal, whenever that embryo is developing over the course of your entire childhood into adolescence and then you know that goal is roughly representative of you at peak reproductive fitness and that's it, they never get a new goal, right? Once that goal is reached and you like have that body morphology and ensure it's informed by how well you eat and exercise and these sorts of things, but roughly like getting to that morphological set point in space was encoded from like the original like embryo that grew into be you. And so once you achieve that goal, then your body kind of starts to reorient and towards like maintaining that state. And once you're in the sort of like, let's maintain this state indefinitely into the future, in the absence of having a new goal in order to have that state be very, very high fidelity. I'm kind of like rambling on with the explanation, but the idea is like a drift in the fidelity of the ability for your body's. Like here, here's the thing that I'll say whenever I give talks, I usually start by saying, you are both the product of and are participant in a collective intelligence and the pro you are the product of the collective intelligence of all of the cells that make up Vance. And so the question is, is like how high fidelity is the goal that's being maintained across the collective intelligence of all the cells that make up Vance?

Benjamin Anderson [01:15:10] Because if that goal's, you know, fidelity starts to get lossy, then maybe vance's physiology and bodies form and space starts to get lossy. And again, like we're in the speculative territory. But that's like sort of a model for saying that if we're looking at these trajectories of change over time and looking at like biophysical like variables inside of the body and how they change with age or like during different states. Like even if you just have like a virus for a couple of weeks, we might be able to see things inside of the body at this level that yeah. Would potentially like elucidate new ways to

Vance Crowe [01:15:47] Innovate. I I am normally, you know, like, oh, let's just, let's just jump in. Let's just do it right. And I, I struggle with any, like when I talk about ai, if somebody's like, yeah, but what about all the dangers? I'm always like, yeah, we'll talk about that later. We got, we got dreaming to do here. When you dream of the future, you've thought a lot about the how this could work and what would go well. What is your, this technology goes out into the world but things don't go well. Like where are the things that this goes off the rails that people should be mindful of?

Benjamin Anderson [01:16:25] That's a good question. Accessibility comes to mind because I mean, these things are expensive. I mean, a

Vance Crowe [01:16:36] I guess I think maybe okay, accessibility. That's like one of those like, oh well everyone get a chance to use

Benjamin Anderson [01:16:40] It. Yeah, I'm

Vance Crowe [01:16:41] Not talking about that. I'm talking about, okay, you can keep the body cancer free. Can the mind handle 150 years of memories?

Benjamin Anderson [01:16:51] Yeah. This, this is a question, right? And they're like, you know, like Mike and people who are thinking about this are thinking about this. I can't say that I'm thinking very deeply about that question yet because I kind of like,

Vance Crowe [01:17:03] Let's do, we'll see it when we get there. I'm I'm, I have no fault on you on that. Like, we'll just see what happens when we get there.

Benjamin Anderson [01:17:10] Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm not saying that there's like not a responsibility to think about those things, but like I wouldn't be working on this if I didn't think that the types of things that I'm talking about are possible. Like, I'm not out in la la land, we're like doing real science. Anybody who's in St. Louis is welcome to come by anytime, talk to RJ and he'll be able to go way more into the second

Vance Crowe [01:17:30] Weeks than I can I, my two daughters to visit your laboratory the other day. It was awesome. I I am not, this is not me like trying to deter you. It's just me being like, let's play a fun exercise game because I had the chance to see my mentor at 105 years old and sit with him in the last weeks of his life. And he told me very clearly, I'm ready to die now. Maybe he was ready to die because he was tired all the time and his body was breaking down. He couldn't go for a jog. He couldn't, he had very low vision, but part of me feels like there was more to that fatigue than just the physical fatigue.

Benjamin Anderson [01:18:12] Did Pete have a goal whenever he was, you know, like, like let's say separate from mentally, but like physiologically re ready to die? He

Vance Crowe [01:18:21] Was physiologically ready to die. I don't, I don't, you know, I, he didn't, he wasn't longing for death. I mean he was very, he was one of the people that was very open about, I believe that death is just nothing. It's like sleep and you just go back to it.

Benjamin Anderson [01:18:35] But

Vance Crowe [01:18:35] He was, he told me in a don't cry for me. I don't want you to be sad. I am, I have lived my life and I'm done. Is taking away is, is curing aging necessarily good?

Benjamin Anderson [01:18:55] Feels like it is to me. I'm wanting to say yes again, I'm not standing on a hill that I would die on, but, you know, if we assume that it's possible at all, someone's gonna do it.

Vance Crowe [01:19:16] Okay.

Benjamin Anderson [01:19:17] It's gonna like, it's gonna happen. It's gonna be out there. It's like the atomic bomb, you know, like the, and so that's why like accessibility might be a hand wave off, but I'm like the, the worst case scenario is in my head, I guess. I mean, we could, we, we could like play into like sci-fi plots of like, someone takes all of the data of like, you know, people that are going into machines like this on a weekly basis and using that in order to, you know, do nefarious things.

Vance Crowe [01:19:46] I think like, oh, I, I, the, the thing that I'm kind of exploring is

Benjamin Anderson [01:19:51] I'm happy to do

Vance Crowe [01:19:51] The exploration, our archetypes that we have for all the stories that we have. You know, the wise old man, the person that has lived life and is now ready to move on, right? The, the, the benefit of new youth and new things coming on. Like, like can the human civilization model will have to change so dramatically if we get rid of aging that what it is to be human itself will change.

Benjamin Anderson [01:20:21] Yeah. And I think that'll be really cool. Like, it's gonna, it's gonna change either way. You know, even like sep set aging aside, like we could talk about AI instead and we could have the same conversation, right? Like the requirement for human beings to think deeply about an intellectual information processing task for more than 60 seconds is rapidly going away as accessibility to AI increases. And as soon as we catch up with robotics, the ability to like do the same rote tasks with like your body and space is gonna go away. And so now we're in like the universal basic income land of like, all right, like we're in the future where like AI is handing all of the base work. And we could ask the same types of questions are how is human? Is it inherently good to have ai if now we've taken away everybody's purpose from the person at the gas station to someone working on, you know, your sink or like surgical robots or replacing doctors, what are people gonna do? And my answer is still, I don't know, but we'll figure it out or we'll die or we'll or we'll go extinct. And so we're playing forward the future of like, what happens if everybody's able to like live as long as they want. Maybe the risk profile of the human species will change in such a way where we're venturing out into space into places that we've never ventured before. Because people will still, like, you're not gonna be like, I mean, it's much harder for me to build a world model where if you get like crushed in a car accident that you're gonna be able to be like rejuvenated as opposed to, you know, maintaining healthy bodily function like on a consistent trajectory in the absence of an event like that.

Benjamin Anderson [01:22:04] So that's a complicated way of saying like, random events could still happen that like take you out of this world.

Vance Crowe [01:22:10] Is AI helping you guys advance what you're working on? Yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [01:22:14] Certainly the ability to get accurate information in front of us is like, you know, way faster for one. Like you don't need to Google and find research papers and then manually read those research papers or control f for certain words to find the information you're looking for can go into a terminal with a large language model or AI and ask questions about science and get answers that are like 99% correct in seconds. So that's huge to be able to like get information needed to like design experiments or choose what things to buy to run experiments or whatever. So that's like one component of it. We're not really using AI for like discovery yet. I think that that's kind of like probably another side tangent as far as like, one of the things that I think think has gone wrong in science, which is that there's more like looking for the needle in the haystack and whoever can raise the most money to do high throughput screening of all of the possible things that could work the fastest is gonna win. Versus saying like, what are fundamentally the ideas that we think could work? And let's do experiments that test those ideas and see if they work. That's not to say that nobody in science is doing the latter, but more and more as I look at like other companies that are raising money, they're raising money to say like, please give me more money faster so that I can do high throughput screening faster to like find the thing that's gonna work the fastest. Right? But the search space that we're combing through, you know, if we're taking a a specific example is transcription factors that could lead to cell reprogramming.

Benjamin Anderson [01:23:48] There are literally more possible combinations of transcription factors than there are atoms in the known universe. So it's like, good luck guys. I'd like to go to the drawing board and come up with some ideas instead. You know,

Vance Crowe [01:24:00] When I think about AI in the world of medical, the thing that strikes me from having gone through the, like cancer and then surgery and all of this is that no doctor told me anything, even one thing different than the AI told me. And that's because doctors are all, you know, they have parameters. Oh, if the tumor is 4.0 centimeters, it stays in. If it's 4.1 now all of a sudden it has to come out. And so like the movement in our world towards limiting liability so that a doctor doesn't take a chance on doing something that he intuitively thinks, he only says what is the protocol? 'cause I know that's what the insurance company will allow and this will keep me from getting sued. It's been funny to me because I think in creating all of those rules, medicine has become something that AI will just run right over those doctors on. But discovery, I don't think so. Like ai AI never brings me anything new, right? Like I, it brings me like, what does everybody already think right now? And good riddance, as far as I'm concerned, if if we, if the, if the medical world went so far in that direction, they're gonna get totally run over.

Benjamin Anderson [01:25:20] Yeah, that's a, that that's a good point. And it goes, yeah, back to the same like regulatory diagnostic thing of like, are we going to change regulations in such a way so as to give users more control over the information that could be used to make actionable medical diagnostic decisions. So like I for example, use a company called Superpower to get regular blood tests and I'll look at my 60 marker blood panel and use that to inform decisions about like certain supplements. Like I can't remember the name of the mutation, but then I notice that I have this mutation and I ask rj, what should I take because of this? I have an increased risk of a heart disease. He is like, well take some B12 and that'll probably mitigate it. You know what I mean? And so like I didn't go to a doctor to make that decision, decision. I made that decision myself.

Vance Crowe [01:26:05] Oh. And if you go to a doctor as I have done after I get my surgery, I was like, all right, I'm gonna go get this panel. Yeah, you

Benjamin Anderson [01:26:10] Have a statin.

Vance Crowe [01:26:11] Yeah. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna have a list of all of these tests that I want to get taken. 'cause I want to have like baseline right after the surgery and then I wanna see do I improve those? How is this all working? Well,

Benjamin Anderson [01:26:21] And you had, you know, I'm referencing conversations outside this one. You had even said you got advice from doctors not to remove your tumor, right? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:26:30] I mean, oh, th this is absurd. Yes. Yeah. But like, the bigger thing I was gonna say is even blood tests themselves, because you have to go to a doctor, you have to be like, can I please have these blood tests? I promise I'll use 'em for all the right things as opposed to being like, it's my blood. There's somebody that has a test, I'm gonna give you my blood, you gimme back the test results.

Benjamin Anderson [01:26:49] It's the, like, this is a rabbit hole that I'm like actively circling on a regular basis of like, you know, the individual's right. To diagnose themselves because it's, it's very pertinent to the types of things that we're looking to do. So going back to like our work, there's sort of like 2, 2 2 paths that we're going down in parallel. When I say we have these like, you know, weird prototypes where we're building a bacta tank to diagnose people with ultrasound. Like we're still on that trajectory, but with MRI, so we're basically working on something like what midjourney put out, but we're still betting on MRI as the factor for getting the information for a number of reasons. And so that is like the read side, the what's going on side and on the other side is the, like, what can we get the body to do with field side? And so going back to the reed side, like fast forward, whether it's a year or two years, and we're like, all right, great, we've got an MRI that you could plug into your wall and use in your house for 50 grand. Are we allowed to sell that? Why or why not? And if we're allowed to sell it, what does it look like? What does the version of it that we're allowed to sell look like? That's a, that's a space that I'm mapping out and that's where I'm learning a lot of these constraints of like, okay, well the short answer is like it would not fit into the existing, you know, regulatory precedent of MRI for that to be being operated in the absence of a physician for one. And so there's like uncertainties there, there's new precedent to set, other new precedents to set are giving users that information directly for them to like diagnose themselves. So if you're getting your own MRI scans and you see that you have t tumors and you're making, and did you see any of the, the pushback from doctors on X or Twitter after the MIDJOURNEY scanner?

Vance Crowe [01:28:28] No, but I, I imagine it's like, oh, but people will get information that they use incorrectly. Oh, people are gonna hurt themselves.

Benjamin Anderson [01:28:35] Yeah. Like my co-founder rj, he's got tens of thousands of people who follow him on, on X and he kind of made a joke where he, he was like, I don't understand the doctor's reactions. The doctors were like, no, no, no, please don't give me more information about my patients. I did like stop, don't, because doctors were coming out and they were like, oh, this is gonna make all these patients seem like they need to do these things that they really don't need to do. Or people are gonna be coming in and getting like, you know, small growths that are benign removed. And it's just like, do we, do we not want more information that would help us do our jobs better, guys?

Vance Crowe [01:29:06] But it, the incentives in the medical field in, in every field where the government is involved, right? Like there becomes very weird things that go on. One of the things that doctors did was that they limited how many people could go to medical school and then they put on top of that diversity and inclusion requirements. So it was no longer only the best people are gonna get into these top spots. It was only the best of a certain percentage. And then we're going to have other criteria. So now you have a system where you've limited the number of doctors, you've also limited the number of competent doctors and people can't get into appointments. And if you go to a doctor, for example, like I did with my surgery, they, they cured me. So I'm not that mad at 'em. Right? But we're good. But, but my experience was I would ask them a question and I'd be like, what's your confidence on this? Right? Like, just give me a sense for how often is the advice you are giving me? Correct. And how much is it not correct? They would not posit even slightly whether, whether it would be, well this is what the best thing is. Well, is are you 90% confident you 80%? It doesn't really matter 'cause it's a human making up a number, but I just wanted to hear him say, right. But the AI will give you a confidence interval and then you can be like, well,

Benjamin Anderson [01:30:21] The AI is just like looking at the statistics and giving you the answer, but,

Vance Crowe [01:30:24] And just giving you information back. I

Benjamin Anderson [01:30:26] Could, I could, I could, I could, you know, this might be a straw man or a steel man. I could identify with the doctor and saying, if I give this percentage in there in the outlier, like it's a liability for me. It's, it's a, you probably taught me this as much as anybody, but it's so interesting in order to like look at complex systems, whether it's the medical system, like regulatory systems, like city governments and say how many of the things that are prompting how people make decisions and act is on the basis of mitigating liability. And it's like a lot.

Vance Crowe [01:30:56] Yeah, I mean every system that is established moves into moves from growth stage. Hey, we're willing to do new things to preserve stage, try and limit how much exposure you have to risk and it will do everything it can to limit risk, including suffocate, whatever it was designed to do in the beginning.

Benjamin Anderson [01:31:19] Yeah, for sure.

Vance Crowe [01:31:21] Well, you've mentioned time several times and like how it's too expensive. We talked about that at the beginning. Something, I know both you and I are engaged in Bitcoin. It's been bad, it's been been low prices. Have you been feeling that?

Benjamin Anderson [01:31:40] I mean, I watch the number go down and you know, it's lower, but I still buy as much as I buy every single day on my dollar cost averaging daily buy order on river.com, subscribe at Vance like,

Vance Crowe [01:31:54] Yeah, I haven't talked to river.com in a while, but yes, the, the,

Benjamin Anderson [01:31:57] I mean number go down number go up, you know where I'm at with like Bitcoin, I'm like, I'm obviously diversifying in real estate as well, but I'm not diversifying what was once Bitcoin. Bitcoin I just continue to stack in Bitcoin and I'm like, okay, well what else can I do to create value in a scarce asset class? Real estate is a place to do that.

Vance Crowe [01:32:15] Yeah. With Bitcoin in me, like after it crossed, I don't know, but when it got into sixties, I started getting the text messages from people that are not Bitcoin supporters, but like wanna rub it in, but know that it's like socially acceptable not to be like, your Bitcoin is failing. Yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [01:32:31] All the power too, I guess. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:32:32] So then they write me and they're like, oh man, I I'm sure you must be kind of freaking out right now. You know, like it, you know, it's, it's okay that things change. You can change your position. I mean, I got multiple text messages that way from people that I don't think they listen to this podcast. Maybe they do, but they were feigning sincerity when really I think they felt like they were getting to dance on the grave of Bitcoin. And I was like, you idiots. I just got paid for a speech coming up in Bitcoin and this is the greatest day I could get, I want that price to be as low as possible, so I get more Bitcoin as the price appreciates it has no bearing on my mood. I look at it and I think like, okay, it means nothing to me. But there are a lot of people, in fact, more than 50% of holders now are underwater, so there are probably a lot of people that are hurting.

Benjamin Anderson [01:33:21] Well, I mean, yeah, I could, I could sympathize, like if I bought most of the Bitcoin I own at 120 versus, you know, like earlier than now, I'll say that. So I'm like, all right, whatever. I guess we'll see.

Vance Crowe [01:33:37] Yeah, it is interesting to, to the, like the psychology of things. There were people that were buying it at one 20 and then as it starts plummeting down, they're like, sell, sell, sell. And

Benjamin Anderson [01:33:46] Like, why were you buying it at one 20 and

Vance Crowe [01:33:48] Not at 50? Right? Yeah. Like, but it, anyway, I just wondered, wondered where you're at on that.

Benjamin Anderson [01:33:54] Yeah, just number go up, number, go down.

Vance Crowe [01:33:57] Well, Benjamin, this has been a lot of fun. If people are interested, we talked a little bit about your real estate, we talked a little bit about your biotech. Where should people go to learn more about you?

Benjamin Anderson [01:34:07] People should just follow the story as I tell it on conscious repository.com. I mean, I, I'm not really active anywhere else. Other than that I'll probably put out like a long form thing about once every month or so, and it might be an idea that I'm excited by. It might be a story that I have to tell. It might be a way that we solve the problem in our company. I kind of get feedback that it's doesn't really fit into any one box, but that's just the place where I say I'm writing up the stories that I tell most often. So it can go to conscious repository.com.

Vance Crowe [01:34:38] Well man, I'm always glad when you come on. Thanks for coming on. Yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [01:34:41] Thanks for inviting me back.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:34:44] All right, that's gonna do it for this week's show. Thank you so much for tuning in. I like showing these little vignettes about Interest-Based Communication. It has become a growing program where having corporations hire us, individuals are flying in from all over the country, and it is really developed into an amazing program. If you are interested in doing the interest based communications class, we have one coming up at the end of August that you can sign up for, but you can learn a little bit more by this video here. And we will be back next week with another interesting interview with a fascinating person. My name is Heath Hunter. I'm a managing director at Broadview Group in our business, your success is dependent on how you're able to effectively tell your story to relate to your customer or your potential partners, and we needed a course that could train our staff on how to do that. I was looking for something much less than what Vance delivered. I literally just wanted him to come in and help us a little bit with storytelling. And he came back with this curriculum, which was awesome. How to craft a memorable introduction, build a story around our firm and how we personally weave into that story. How do we continue the conversation through asking good questions, how to negotiate in a collaborative way versus a competitive way so that we maintain that relationship that we've worked so hard to build. Our relationships are everything. To me, Interest-Based Communication is really understanding the perspectives and the point of view of others being able to meet them where they are.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:36:21] Interest-Based Communication to me is creating a dialogue with someone else sitting across the table for me. It allows each party to really describe what they care about and work together to accomplish that for each party. A lot of people, myself included before I took Vince's class, really went in with higher weight on what was important to me. Everybody has a tendency to just focus in on the price, but there are hundreds of other components that come into something as complex as a transaction for a company. What are they actually interested in? What do they hope to achieve and what does success look like for them walking out of a negotiation? Those could differ widely from how they're showing up. If we can somehow get on the same page, you can create these collaborative solutions that are a win for everyone, we've definitely woven that into the process. We're trying to ask those deep probing questions on what are their motivations, what do they care about? Really understanding who they are, introducing yourself to better communicate who you are and your background. What makes a good introduction? This is something that I, I really appreciated and I've been in the workforce for, you know, 27 plus years and done lots of introductions. I've heard lots of introductions, making a good introduction. I think everyone just assumes that you should just kind of start talking about yourself and go into your title and what you do. And frankly, that's typically not very memorable or interesting. Going through this course and learning about storytelling and the arc of a story and how to embed that in your introduction was honestly like nothing I'd ever heard before.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:38:00] And it makes a lot of sense, right? 'cause if you're a good storyteller, you tend to sort of capture an audience and you want to be able to do that with your introduction, sort of that hook that you need in, in a story. For me, the big thing was having faith that sitting back and really paying attention to the conversation will help draw out a connection. Before I would spend my time trying to, okay, what do I have in common with this person? Oh yeah, this is a chance to interject and, and establish that link. Ironically, just kind of stepping back and saying, I'm just gonna really pay attention to what's in front of me. It really has impacted the conversation because you can get deeper faster. I used to think it was all about how interesting I could come across, but what I've learned, and honestly what Vance taught us, the most interesting folks that you run across, ask really good questions. That's been a game changer for me. Instead of trying to focus on myself, focusing fully on the other person and really just listening for like, what are the details that they're giving me, because there's a reason that they mention that. We assume that folks can kind of see what we see in our heads. And what this course taught us about diagramming your ideas is to put it on paper, put it out there so the other parties can see it. We were meeting with a group that week and we were trying to communicate different ideas and outline a vision for this potential business. Instead of doing it in a PowerPoint format, we did it on a whiteboard. It was transformational. The CEO, he, he just lit up. We actually handed the pen over to him and we said, Hey, show us where we've got it wrong, or show us where you have additional ideas, the level of engagement, you know, went through the roof and he got up and you could see he was almost giddy.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:39:41] Having that limiter of the speed of your hand, you're bringing them along and you know your idea you're trying to convey. So the practicality of the course, the mirroring, the diagramming, the exercises. I think that's one of the things that I appreciated most about the course. Super candidly, I've been through a lot of these in my career and you walk out of there and you're like, well, that was a waste of time. What I can tell you about what Vance brought to the table. I, at no point ever felt that way. I was able to walk out of every single session and put to work immediately what we had practiced that day. He has a great way of connecting concepts so that you have this, you know, holistic framework, so to speak, to connect with people, which is something that we do all the time, but deliberate practice of it really helped up my game. I would recommend that everyone take this course, and I would venture to say that this has been more impactful for me at home than at work. Pretty much everybody is having conversations and negotiations at home. I feel super lucky and blessed that we were able to have this course at work and that it sort of bleeds into home life. I think that's kind of the best of both worlds. Any corporation or any firm, no matter what the size I think would benefit from something like this, who I'd recommend this to, is a small group of professionals who are really dedicated to self-improvement. Interest-Based Communication to me is a holistic way to build relationships. Can benefit anyone.